ThermTech: Excellence in Normalizing Heat Treatment

Normalizing Heat Treatment for Various Steel Products

ThermTech is at the forefront of providing normalizing heat treatment across a range of steel products, ensuring homogenized grain structure, enhanced machinability, and optimized response to subsequent heat-treating processes. Our offerings span steel forgings, castings, machined parts, and investment castings.

Steel Forgings:

Steel forgings often undergo heat treatment due to their production at high temperatures which result in non-uniform microstructure and grain size. Normalizing steel offers a solution by:

  • Heating forgings slightly above the austenitizing temperature, promoting atomic mobility and steel homogenization.
  • Cooling in still air, with adjustable rates depending on desired hardness.
  • Producing forgings that are easier to machine with uniform mechanical performance upon subsequent quenching and tempering.

Common Steel Grades: 4140, 4340, 8620, 4130, 1045.

Castings:

Castings can develop uneven microstructures due to inconsistent cooling post-casting. Normalizing helps in:

  • Refining the grain structure, ensuring a balanced distribution of carbon content post-casting.
  • Alleviating “segregation”, where alloy elements segregate during casting or hot rolling.
  • Offering specialized services for Ductile Iron Castings, ensuring they conform to specific mechanical property requirements.

Our team, including two metallurgists, offers valuable insights into alloying and processing considerations, ensuring conformance to even the most stringent requirements for DCI parts.

Machined Parts:

Machined parts often require normalizing to:

  • Refine grain structure, ensuring uniform carbon content distribution.
  • Address issues like “banding” which occurs when alloy elements segregate during forging or hot rolling.

Investment Castings:

Investment castings, which cool in ceramic molds, can sometimes develop undesired microstructures and decarburization. Normalizing offers a way to homogenize the grain structure, improve machinability, and ensure better outcomes from subsequent heat treatments.

State-of-the-Art Facilities:

  • All our normalizing processes are conducted in batch-type furnaces ensuring optimal process and lot control.
  • Every ThermTech furnace is AMS 2750 certified, guaranteeing top-notch temperature uniformity during the hardening process.

Additional Services:

For those seeking a pristine finish post-normalizing, ThermTech provides several blasting services to eradicate any oxide or scale.

At ThermTech, our commitment is not just towards offering exceptional heat treatment solutions, but also towards empowering our clients with the knowledge and expertise that comes from years of industry leadership. Whatever your need, ThermTech stands ready to deliver with precision and excellence.

ThermTech—Experts in Austempering Stampings, Machined Parts, and Investment Castings

ThermTech, Inc. offers both small and large batch capabilities for austempering steel and iron investment castings. Between our neutral salt bath furnaces and our larger austempering furnaces, we have the capabilities to austemper a wide variety of stamping, machined components, and investment castings. We have run austempering on alloys from 1060 through 4340 to ductile iron machined parts.

Our dedicated team works with you to ensure we meet your specifications. Count on our decades of experience with hardening, tempering, surface heat treatments, vacuum treatments, and annealing. To learn more about our services, please contact us today.

Learn more about austempering and how ThermTech can serve you by watching these videos.

Request a free quote online or call us at 800-752-6917. You can also contact us online for all your austempering and heat treating needs.





    AWARDS & CERTIFICATIONS

    ThermTech’s quality policy is ZERO DEFECTS for all customer products and in all quality management system activities. Through our efforts to continually improve the quality of the work we offer, we’ve been recognized as being able to meet the rigorous quality standards required by several of our major customers. ThermTech is certified for ISO 9001 and AS9100 in both Metal Heat Treat and Metal Finishing.